17 Tips for Improving Inbound Marketing Results

The exciting thing about inbound marketing is that it works so well for businesses in just about any industry. While it takes a bit of time to get it moving, once results start coming in, they are less expensive and highly motivating.

It’s a great reward for a lower investment. But, one thing about inbound marketing is that it takes a lot of effort from the start. There are a lot of moving pieces, so to speak, and in almost every case I’ve seen, one aspect is either being ignored, overlooked or undervalued.

This doesn’t mean you aren’t getting results- surely you are. The main foundation of inbound marketing is content and that alone does a great job in increasing traffic and leads from a website.

However, there are quite a few ways you can improve results, to get the amazing return on investment promised when you first started inbound marketing.

1- Take a hard look at your strategy- inbound marketing includes blogging, SEO, landing pages, lead generation, traffic, calls to action, email marketing and social media. Which of these pieces are you currently ignoring?

2- Implement all pieces of inbound marketing- even if you are already providing or getting decent results from inbound marketing, implementing all aspects will drastically improve results.

When you are in the position of providing great results to clients or your boss, you earn the opportunity to get more work, larger budgets and more risk.

3- Stop overlooking the Delight phase- Hubspot has social media mostly under the delight phase of inbound, and for this reason many agencies put very little focus at all in social media, leaving massive opportunities on the table.

The delight phase is there to help your company or clients keep clients engaged and happy for future purchases and opportunities, even in B2B marketing.

You should have blog posts that delight, social media activity that engages followers and emails that keep customers or clients coming back. You should not forget current clients while only focusing on bringing in new sales.

4- Train your entire team- Hubspot offers extensive training for users and partners. While this is quite the time investment, having every person on your team understanding the goals you are trying to achieve is imperative to reaching those goals- train everyone.

5- Don’t overlook your contractors- Contractors are a big part of business, they work for you, for Hubspot partners and on their own. One of the major issues I’ve seen is not giving contractors enough access to information about your plan of action.

They should have access to personas, landing pages or calls to action. Writers are one of the main people in your inbound strategy and yet are often the most overlooked for opportunities to inform.

When they have access to this information, they can write better pieces that convert visitors.

6- Promote your content- Simply posting your new blog posts and leaving them to pick up search traffic is a waste of opportunity.

Social media accounts give you the opportunity to immediately collect traffic and leads based on a new piece you’ve published. This doesn’t just mean post to Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin automatically.

Appropriate content promotion is much more involved but worth the time investment.In my experience I’ve easily taken blog posts with as few as 4 views with days of publishing to a hundred or more views and social media shares in the same amount of time.

Does it bring in leads- absolutely! Does it improve results for the business- absolutely!

Would you rather 4 views in 4 days or 100+ views and shares on social media in 4 days?

7- Take care of social media accounts

- They are not just broadcasting channels, but a place to build relationships. It doesn’t need to take a huge amount of time, and you can get a lot done with just regular updates (not all links to your own website).

Update B2B Facebook pages at least double the amount of time you are promoting content.Tweet curated content from yours or your client’s industries on Twitter automatically with Tweet Adder.

There are a lot of options that can help you save time and money without sacrificing the effectiveness of social media in inbound marketing- feel free to ask me about it.

8- Connect with your team often- Remote teams have to make sure they connect on a regular basis, and in some instances do a better job of this than in office agencies or companies who get caught up in doing their job and don’t take the time to connect, share and build strategy.

I recommend multiple weekly meetings to discuss clients, leads, blogging ideas, and other information that is current in your industry or inbound marketing.

9- Stay educated- Inbound marketing, social media and SEO are constantly changing. To stay ahead, you have to stay on top of changes and make sure you adjust with new information. Daily reading is a must, start with some of your most popular blogs and follow Hubspot on social media accounts for news alerts.

10- Do not ignore analytics and reporting- The numbers your website produces are the key to what is working and what isn’t. You should be checking your numbers regularly, if not weekly to make sure they are in align with your goals and actions. By looking at your numbers you can see exactly where you need to make adjustments to improve results- this step is imperative.

11- Stay trained in Hubspot- Hubspot itself is constantly changing. Older tutorials are usually updated but it takes some time. They are always making improvements to the software to make it easier for you to use and get results. Additionally their classes change to adjust to these improvements. Stay on top of certifications and classes offered to give your clients the best chance at success.

12- Talk with other users of Hubspot- The Linkedin discussion forum is a great place to ask other Hubspot users about their experience with Hubspot, as well as any issues you have with using it. Hubspot themselves watches their Linkedin forums carefully and maintains them everyday to uphold quality. Check them out:

13- Talk to your clients or boss regularly about inbound- Sometimes clients or bosses don’t understand how integrated inbound marketing can be with other aspects of business, from other marketing campaigns to sales and keeping customers happy for future purchases, inbound should be part of the 5discussion. Chat with clients and/or your boss often to see how else you can use inbound to get impressive results.

14- Write better pieces- Content marketing through inbound is a great way to bring in search traffic, and while it will bring in traffic even if the content isn’t very good, the bounce rate will be high.

In a world where everyone is providing content, each piece needs to be specific, well-written and informative for the reader. Talk to your clients and boss often to see what they have for blog ideas, and interview them to get in-depth information for each post (where possible).

15- Reconsider your writers- The cost you invest into each piece is going to adversely affect exactly how well the piece performs. When you have multiple people working on each piece, it costs more time and money. Pay a decent rate and writers will be willing to format, add images, distribute content, and provide a better reader experience.

16- Make the time- One of the biggest reasons we don’t follow through on things (even inbound marketing) is because we don’t have the time. This means other things take priority. What we need to do is make the time to follow through with inbound marketing methodology, strategy and implementation, otherwise the investment is for nothing.

17- Offer more giveaways- Statistically the more landing pages you have, the more leads you’ll collect. The goal is to shoot for more than 15 landing pages- that means 15 different offers. It is possible, with content and persona mapping to come up with appropriate giveaways for each stage of the buying process.

Inbound marketing is not easy, but for those of us that love it, it is fun. It can be overwhelming for anyone and some of those people are on your team, are your clients or could be you. Hubspot and others who enjoy inbound marketing want to help.

Connect with me, or anyone you know in inbound marketing to get the answers you need. Inbound marketing works, if you put in the time and effort. You can do it!